I thought I would take Yahoo’s new baby Buzz out for a spin. First impressions are nothing to write home about. Yahoo Buzz seems to be a near perfect copy of Digg. Digg occupies an envious position in the blogosphere because of its unique ability for users to submit content, news stories as they happen and also vote on its popularity. Many other sites have come up trying to outdo Digg by doing the same thing, but Digg has continued to maintain is popularity thanks to its loyal "Diggers" base who have remained faithful till now.
On first impressions Yahoo Buzz is quite a lot similar to Digg and nothing really new or exciting is taking place. One also feels that Yahoo will find it tough going to dethrone Digg anytime soon. That somehow has been Yahoo’s story for the past couple of years. Yahoo does make good products and services, but only to find out someone has already beat them to it and Yahoo is always playing catch up and never quite reaching the No. 1 position it held until Google came along and beat it to it.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do like Yahoo, but like many others have switched over to Gmail and Google Talk which perform so much better than Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger. Yahoo Messenger especially sucks big time these days (Yahoo engineers are hopefully reading this!).
Coming back to Buzz, well these are still early days and I will keep you posted on the updates as and when they happen. One thing Yahoo does have going for it in it’s favor is the massive user base it has and this might help it to pull off something with Buzz, but that’s something only time will tell and let’s hope for Yahoo’s sake that Buzz does amount to something in the long run since it would be very sad to say R.I.P. Yahoo especially if Microsoft has its way.
